YouTube can be a rich source of video content, with contributors from across the country and even around the globe. Among my favorite are railfans in Japan, many of whom visit branch lines to record small electric and diesel multiple-unit passenger trains serving rural towns and villages. In some ways, it’s not too difficult to imagine these scenes served by gas-powered “doodlebugs” on the rural branches of North America a century ago.
Of course, Japan’s branch lines differ a great deal from our own. First, and perhaps most surprisingly, theirs are younger, many of them dating to the early 20th century, a period after our rural network was already shrinking. Second, their continued existence is dependent more upon the provision of passenger services to small communities, with very little freight traffic — again, almost the exact opposite of American development.
One of the most unusual things about Japan’s railway network, however, is its gauge. Except for the high-speed Shinkansen lines, almost all of the country’s network has rails set just 42 inches — 3 feet 6 inches — apart. We may again be able to point to the relative youth of Japan’s railways as a reason. The country did not begin constructing railways until the 1870s, and to do so, it relied upon the expertise of British engineers.
At the time, the British Empire was global in scale, encompassing Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India (including the future Pakistan), and large portions of Africa. Railway construction was an important part of attempting to manage such a vast empire. In response, many engineers proposed that a narrower gauge, rather than the “standard” or “Stephenson” gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches, would be more economical. As a result, the railways of South Africa, New Zealand, much of Australia, and many other portions of the Empire were constructed to this narrow gauge, leading some to nickname it “Cape Gauge,” after the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. When the Japanese government sought to construct a nationwide system in the early 1870s, its British consultants turned quite naturally to the common gauge already being used around the globe. From that point onward, most railways built in Japan used Cape Gauge.
What may be more surprising is the use of Cape Gauge in North America. The most famous of these are the island railways of eastern Canada, specifically Prince Edward Island Railway and Newfoundland Railway. Like Japan’s first lines, both were laid in the early 1870s by British engineers. Both were exceedingly long-lived as well, eventually becoming part of Canadian National. Dieselized in the 1950s, these island Cape Gauge lines closed in the late 1980s.
Cape Gauge also appears in North American rail transit. Several West Coast cities had streetcar systems built to this narrower profile. The largest were Los Angeles Railway and Portland Railway, Light & Power, in their namesake cities. In both cases, the lower costs of construction were a factor in the choice of gauge. Both systems were abandoned in the 1950s, in part responding to competition from automobiles, and in part due to these operators converting to cheaper-to-maintain bus systems.
There is, though, one North American transit line that still operates on Cape Gauge, and it is, ironically, one of the most famous — San Francisco’s cable car system. Its two extant routes are products of the 1870s, and every day these slim-gauge cars climb up and down the hills of the city, the last survivor of an obscure chapter of North American railway development.
—Alexander Benjamin Craghead is a transportation historian, photographer, artist, and author.